Inconsistency-tolerant Query Answering in Ontology-based Data Access

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is receiving great attention as a new paradigm for managing information systems through semantic technologies. According to this paradigm, a Description Logic ontology provides an abstract and formal representation of the domain of interest to the information system, and is used as a sophisticated schema for accessing the data and formulating queries over them. In this paper, we address the problem of dealing with inconsistencies in OBDA. Our general goal is both to study DL semantical frameworks that are inconsistency-tolerant, and to devise techniques for answering unions of conjunctive queries under such inconsistency-tolerant semantics. Our work is inspired by the approaches to consistent query answering in databases, which are based on the idea of living with inconsistencies in the database, but trying to obtain only consistent information during query answering, by relying on the notion of database repair. We first adapt the notion of database repair to our context, and show that, according to such a notion, inconsistency-tolerant query answering is intractable, even for very simple DLs. Therefore, we propose a different repair-based semantics, with the goal of reaching a good compromise between the expressive power of the semantics and the computational complexity of inconsistency-tolerant query answering. Indeed, we show that query answering under the new semantics is first-order rewritable in OBDA, even if the ontology is expressed in one of the most expressive members of the DL-Lite family

Pre-fermentative cold maceration in the presence of non-Saccharomyces strains: effect on fermentation behaviour and volatile composition of a red wine

Background and Aims This study evaluated the impact of pre‐fermentative cold maceration (PCM), in the presence of two non‐Saccharomyces yeasts, Metschnikowia pulcherrima MP 346 and Metschnikowia fructicola MF 98‐3, and of a commercial pectic enzyme, on fermentation kinetics and on the volatile composition of a Sangiovese red wine. Methods and Results Sangiovese grape must was inoculated with MP 346 or MF 98‐3 or treated with a pectic enzyme preparation during PCM, at 5°C for 24 or 72 h. A Control wine was produced by a pure culture of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Both non‐Saccharomyces strains affected the initial yeast population dynamics and the persistence of S. cerevisiae at the end of malolactic fermentation. Irrespective of the duration of PCM, the inoculum of Metschnikowia strains did not influence the rate of sugar consumption or the kinetics of malolactic fermentation. The volatile composition of the final wines was evaluated with solid‐phase extraction, followed by GC/MS. The concentration of some terpenes and C13‐norisoprenoids, nerol, geraniol, 8‐hydroxy‐linalool (cis) and 3‐oxo‐α‐ionol, and of some esters, isoamyl lactate and ethyl isoamyl succinate, was higher in wines inoculated with Metschnikowia strains than in the Control and wine treated with pectic enzyme. Conclusions Metschnikowia yeast strains MP 346 and MF 98‐3 affect wine volatile composition. Significance of the Study This study shows for the first time that an inoculum of Metschnikowia strains MP 346 and MF 98‐3 during PCM is effective in modulating the volatile composition of a Sangiovese red wine

Understanding and controlling the efficiency of Au24M(SR)18 nanoclusters as singlet-oxygen photosensitizers

Atomically precise Au24M(SR)18 clusters were used as singlet-oxygen photosensitizers. Comprehensive kinetic analysis provided insights into the mechanism and driving-force dependence of the quenching of 1O2 by gold nanoclusters

Semantic Analysis of R2RML Mappings for Ontology-Based Data Access

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) deals with the problem of accessing autonomous data sources through a shared, virtual ontology, and declarative mappings connecting the data sources to the ontology. The W3C standard R2RML allows for mapping relational data sources to RDFS/OWL ontologies. In this paper, we present algorithms for the semantic analysis of R2RML mappings in the OBDA setting, when the ontology is expressed in OWL 2 QL. The focus of such algorithms is to identify the main semantical anomalies (inconsistency and redundancy) of a mapping specification with respect to the ontology and/or the data sources. Such algorithms have been implemented in the mapping analysis tool developed within the Optique European project. We also report on the experiments conducted within the Optique project use cases

Mastro: Ontology-Based Data Access at Work (Extended Abstract)

In this paper we present the current version of Mastro, a system for ontologybased data access (OBDA) developed at Sapienza Università di Roma. Mastro allows users for accessing external data sources by querying an ontology expressed in a fragment of the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL). As in data integration [5], mappings are used in OBDA to specify the correspondence between a unified view of the domain (called global schema in data integration terminology) and the data stored at the sources. The distinguishing feature of the OBDA approach, however, is the fact that the global schema is specified using an ontology language, which typically allows to provide a rich conceptualization of the domain of interest, independently from the source representation

M.: Consistent query answering over description logic ontologies

Abstract. Description Logics (DLs) have been widely used in the last years as formal language for specifying ontologies over the web. Due to the dynamic nature of this setting, it may frequently happen that data retrieved from the web contradict the intensional knowledge provided by the ontology through which they are collected, which therefore may result inconsistent. In this paper, we analyze the problem of consistent query answering over DL ontologies, i.e., the problem of providing meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent ontologies. We provide inconsistency tolerant semantics for DLs, and study the computational complexity of consistent query answering over ontologies specified in DL-Lite, a family of DLs specifically tailored to deal with large amounts of data. We show that the above problem is coNP-complete w.r.t. data complexity, i.e., the complexity measured w.r.t. the size of the data only. Towards identification of tractable cases of consistent query answering over DL-Lite ontologies, we then study the problem of consistent instance checking, i.e., the instance checking problem considered under our inconsistency-tolerant semantics. We provide an algorithm for it which runs in time polynomial in the size of the data, thus showing that the problem is in PTIME w.r.t. data complexity

Ontology-based data access with MASTRO (Demo)

and the Semantic Web [4], clients need to access the services exported by the system, and hence require a representation of the intensional level of the application domain in terms of which they can specify the access to the exported services. One of the most interesting usages of such a shared conceptualization is ontology-based data access, where a conceptual layer is exported to the client, abstracting away from how actual data is maintained. Therefore, an ontology-based data access system has to adress the “impedance mismatch ” issue, existing between data actually present at the sources, and objects represented at the intensional level. In this demo, we present MASTRO, an ontology-based data access system that ex-tends the QuOnto system [1] with new capabilities and uses the QuOnto engine at its core. Specifically, MASTRO provides tractable reasoning over an ontology, laying over an autonomous relational DBMS managing the data layer. In what follows, we introduce the main services provided by MASTRO, namely (i) ontology specification, (ii) query answering, (iii) ontology satisfiability, and (iv) meta-query answering. The present work is one of the outcomes of the European project TONES1